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Sunday, May 7, 2017

Macron wins in France by decisive margin

French voters handed Emmanuel Macron, the independent
candidate, a decisive victory in the presidential runoff Sunday over
Marine Le Pen, the far-right candidate, buoying Europe’s political
establishment that had watched with despair as populist movements
threatened to derail the European experiment.

Macron, 39, who
had all but been endorsed by Europe’s leaders after his first-round
victory on April 23, earned 65.5 percent of the vote, according to early exit polls;
Le Pen won 34.5 percent—slightly higher than polls had predicted. The
polls projected Macron would win approximately 64 percent of the vote.
Voter turnout was 74 percent by the time polls closed at 8 p.m. local
time, markedly lower than the 80 percent that turned out in 2012.
Approximately 4 million blank votes were cast.

Not only is Macron the youngest president in French history (he’s a year
younger than Louis-Napoléon, Napoléon Bonaparte’s nephew, who was 40
when he was elected in 1848), he is also the first president in modern
French history who does not belong to a major political party. Despite
briefly serving as economy minister under outgoing Socialist President
François Hollande, Macron quit the government in August 2016 to launch
his own independent party, En Marche!, which he said aimed to “reconcile the two Frances that have been growing apart for too long.” (Continues)